Endorsements and Testimonials

The Living Earth Community team is deeply grateful for all of the kind, generous responses we’ve received from all over the world. We share some of those with you, here. 

Like a vigorous tree uniting soil and sky, the Living Earth Community website is a rich hub of connection. Webs of ideas, writings, multimedia, and ecological experience meet and entangle in fruitful, generative relationships.

David Haskell, author of Song of Trees and forthcoming How Flowers Made our World

It’s perhaps a cliché to speak of Living Earth Community as an oasis in the desert; perhaps a more accurate description is that of a garden, curated with the wisdom and passion of a master gardener. Living Earth Community is more than an information resource; it’s a map of where we’ve been, where we are, and of the country ahead. In a time when data and knowledge is being purged as if with flamethrowers, Living Earth Community is a trusted and treasured repository of deep natural intelligence, in this burning era of the artificial.

Rick Bass, Author of For a Little While, The Lives of Rocks: Stories, and most recently Wrecking Ball: Race, Friendship, God and Football; Executive Director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council in Montana.

Outstanding! A beautifully produced and easy-to-navigate website that explores our science-based understandings of living beings: their evolution, their capabilities, their ecosystems, and the groundings they bring to us as we seek spiritual and moral orientation. The fluent texts that accompany the elegant images elicit engagement and wonder without bogging us down in details, with well-chosen references provided to explore topics more deeply. A tour de force!

Ursula Goodenough, Author of The Sacred Depths of Nature; Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University; Former President of the Religious Naturalist Association

The Living Earth Community website maps a broad, beautiful landscape of hope and renewal. There are no fences on this landscape. It is a commons of knowledge and understanding, with paths that lead explorers through new fields of wonder and reverence toward transformative action to protect the grandeur of cosmic evolution. At a tangled, uncertain place in time, the website helps us find our way into the rich and growing collection of curated sources that become a moral compass, pointing to our responsibility as part of a caring community. A website to match the moment, it is both an invaluable resource and a joyful celebration of human kinship with the sentient world.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Emerita Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University; author of many books including, Earth’s Wild Music

This awesome website is a genuine treasure beautifully exploring and documenting the multitude of ways and degrees in which the community of nature and planet Earth are sentient. This has been recognized for millennia by Indigenous peoples, more than a century ago by Henry David Thoreau and John Muir among others, and finally in recent decades progressively by Western science through empirical research. The website is so rich with inspiring information that it could be the focus of an entire course, a university certificate or even degree!

Leslie E. Sponsel, Professor University of Hawaii, author Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution https://spiritualecology.info/

Living Earth Community reminds us that humans are just one strand in a vast, evolving web of life—and our worldviews, communities, and laws must reflect this reality. This robust collection of wisdom and resources is invaluable for changemakers working toward a future where humans flourish in harmony with the rest of Nature.

Grant Wilson, Executive Director, Earth Law Center

The work of Living Earth Community is a critical intervention at a time when Humanity stands at a critical moment. Humanity has the choice to re-embrace the systems values framework essential to enlivening the Living Earth Community! I stress that the issue is about re-embracing, because a living systems values framework underpin the essence of our humanity! It enabled our evolution and sustainability as a human race! 

Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, Founding trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation; past co-president of The Club of Rome; Chair of the Desmond Tutu IP Trust

The Living Earth Community is a feast of information and engagement, including a great compendium of books and articles and multimedia resources. Whether you are a teacher or minister or practitioner, or some other sort of student, it contains much you will realize you needed.

Steven Kolmes, Editor-in-Chief, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development

I’m deeply inspired by The Living Earth Community from the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. It beautifully reflects the Earth Charter’s vision of living with reverence, justice, and care for our shared planet. 

Michael J. Bracken, Board Chair, Earth Charter International

This important site guides one to important resources for the ongoing journey, the great work of engaging the all-important task of enhancing human-earth relations. Explore books, media resources, and podcast links that amplify and fine tune our knowledge of and intimacy with the cosmos.

Christopher Key Chapple, Doshi Chair of Indic and Comparative Theology, founding Director, LMU’s Master of Arts in Yoga, Theology Department, Loyola Marymount University 

Having worked in many aspects of environmentalism—both secular and faith-oriented—I was absolutely delighted by your new Living Earth Community website. What a gift you have assembled with such rich information and invitations to walk one with Earth from such a wide variety of sources in one central location. And what a joy to hear the voice of Earth herself and her many wondrous creatures permeate the beautiful pages. 

Beth Norcross, Founder, The Center for Spirituality in Nature, author of The Wisdom of Trees

“The Living Earth Community” is remembering and reflecting on itself in this stunning and compendious website that offers a kaleidoscope of ways to research, study, and explore the wonders of our glorious planet.  Thanks to the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology for the bounty of this stunning multi-media archive of Earth’s still unfolding story.

Kathleen Deignan, Professor Emerita Religious Studies; Founder Deignan Institute for Earth and Spirit, Iona University; editor of Thomas Berry: A Book of Hours

Comprehensive, beautiful, and profoundly alive—this website doesn’t just inform, it immerses us in the reality that the whole, and all within it, is infused with life and intelligence.

Jennifer Morgan, president, Deeptime Network; author of the Universe Story Trilogy (includes Born with a Bang, From Lava to Life, and Mammals Who Morph)

Living Earth Community (LEC) is an integral part of the digital commons of human communities caring for the wellbeing of the more-than-human world. Embodying the visions of Thomas Berry and others, LEC reaffirms the intelligence of nature and of humanity’s role in unfolding healthier planetary futures from our remembered indigenous pasts.  A plethora of invigorating outcomes from LEC’s lively public engagements and actionable policy-implications are undoubtedly foreseeable. 

Dan Smyer Yü, PhD, Global Faculty Member, The Global South Studies Center, the University of Cologne

 You call it a website, I call it a living universe! I have never seen such an extraordinary website – extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily informative, brilliantly organized and laid out… Well, beyond words. But you surely had dedicated help with this because the task of it, to look so simple and lovely but to contain so much, must have been daunting! I just want to lose myself in each page and to go deeper and deeper. Wild congratulations to everyone and deep gratitude.

Sheri Ritchlin, editor of Revision: Integral Consciousness; specialist in the I Ching